Saturday, March 28, 2015

‘Reality on a special day’: White God and the power of a parable

Lili, played by Zsófia Psotta, and her dog, Hagen, share a moment of peace in White God.

I cannot tell you what White
God is. That is to say: I can tell you what it is about, but I cannot tell
you what it is. Recognizable tropes abound from such disparate genres as coming-of-age
family films, satirical black comedies, grindhouse slasher pictures, and
incendiary political thrillers. It is, by turns, each of these, and in so
being, it transcends them all. White God
is not defined by its genre but by the boundlessness of its scope and the
vibrancy of its storytelling.

The film played last week in New York City as part of the
Lincoln Center and Museum of Modern Art’s New Directors, New Films Festival.
Director Kornél Mundruczó and
co-writer Kata Wéber were on hand to introduce the film and stayed for a
question-and-answer session after the screening. White God has played to
rave reviews at festivals around the world, even winning the Un Certain Regard
competition at Cannes last year, and finally opens in select theaters for
American audiences this weekend.

‘A very fragile question’

Director Kornél Mundruczó

Lili (Zsófia Psotta) is an average 13-year-old Hungarian
girl whose best friend seems to be her dog, Hagen. She is forced to stay with
her father (Sándor Zsótér) for a few months while her mother goes on a trip
with her new boyfriend. Faced with paying a fine because the dog is a mutt,
Lili and her father must decide whether to take him to a shelter, where he will
most likely be put down, or set him loose on the streets. Though Lili protests
that they should do neither, her father leaves him on the side of the road, and
so begins Hagen and Lili’s long journey back to one another.

It is a familiar enough premise and could have made for a
simple tale about a girl and her dog, but Mundruczó, Wéber, their other co-writer,
Viktória Petrányi, have no interest in simplicity. Instead, they tell the parallel
stories of two loners living in a culture that treats outcasts with disdain
when they are noticed at all. In their own ways, Hagen and Lili are both pushed
aside, beaten down, and kicked around by a world that has no need for them. How
they choose to rebel against this treatment is the basis for the movie’s final
point about where we are all headed if we do not stand up and take notice of
the culture we have let fester.

“I had a huge anger
about my society,” said Mundruczó, through a thick Hungarian accent. “Just standing in a dog pound, I felt that
shame that we’re talking about. I was also part of the [movie] business, and I
have a responsibility to talk about my society and criticize my society as much
as I can. This movie was on the one hand very slow because of financing and
shooting, but we wrote the script in one month, with really reflecting how [criticizing
our society] is a good thing. Let’s face it, our society, with the movie. Of
course, still, it’s a very fragile question.”

Mundruczó paints a picture of a nation in decline and a
society that is coming apart at the seams due to its inequities. On top are the
authority figures such as the teachers, the police, and in Hagen’s case, the
dog catchers. Below are the hungry masses, the abused, and the forgotten. As a
system, it is unsustainable, and Mundruczó sees this. A change is going to
come, and that the revolution is filmed from the point of view of hundreds of
stray dogs is the film’s master stroke.

‘An emotional draw’

Lili’s story functions as a more traditional tale of a girl
growing up, but Hagen goes through hell. While Lili experiences all the pains
of adolescence such as run-ins with the law, experimentation with drugs, and trouble
at home and school, Hagen is literally beaten and broken until something inside
him snaps. At a key moment, after being forced to commit an unspeakably awful
act, he decides he is no longer anyone’s dog. He is his own master. However,
these two stories do not work without one another.

Though Lili and Hagen begin the story together and the story
ends with them in the same place, their separate and complementary character
arcs imbue the film’s climax with a depth of emotion that would have been
impossible to achieve otherwise. In a more traditional narrative, the tension
would be derived from whether or not these two will find each other again, but
they are so fundamentally changed by the events that transpire that we are left
to wonder if they will even recognize each other when they do.

“It’s a mirroring
story, somehow, between these two characters,” said Wéber. “We wanted to make
this film about the dog, a dog in Budapest, but then we realized that we need a
counter-story, something that grabs our attention and gives us an angle, how to
see the loss of this dog. … I think this helps us to really be able to follow
the story as free as possible, almost like a child jumping from one genre to
the other. So, I think that’s why it was a good choice to have this character
[of Lili] and also an emotional draw, which can pull us through this whole
journey with such different challenges and characters also.”

‘That was my lesson’

Mundruczó and co-writer Kata Wéber

On a technical level, White
God manages to pull off a number of seemingly impossible feats, not the
least of which is casting more than 200 real dogs adopted from shelters to portray
the film’s revolutionary army, such as it is. In developing the film, Mundruczó
had two hard and fast rules: There would be no CGI, and there would be no
trained, purebred dogs. All of the dogs had to be “newcomers from the pounds,”
as he put it.

“I’m quite a
control-freak director – hopefully not anymore,” he said. “That was my lesson:
to give [the dogs] lots of freedom, and they really played. It was shooting a
very special method because we use one week shooting, one week training time,
and [the dogs] drive the script. … They can’t do what they cannot, so it was
really like we worked together, and it taught me a lot about patient curiosity
and two races can cooperate.”

That patient curiosity pays off in spades in the film’s
extended climax as wave after wave of dogs crashes down upon the city. Even
before that, though, Mundruczó is able to capture the real world of these
animals as they experience it. In a turn of events straight out of “Oliver
Twist,” Hagen comes upon a group of stray dogs at an abandoned housing project
that functions as its own little society. The dogs run, jump, play, and fight
in ways that could never be taught, and Mundruczó is smart enough to let his
camera simply observe the action.

Cinematographer Marcell Rév keeps the camera near the ground
for much of the film, placing the audience squarely at the level of the dogs.
What they see, we see. What they feel, we feel. It is an ingenious way both of
putting viewers in the headspace of the animals and of subtly telling us who
the true heroes of the story are.

It is to Rév and editor Dávid Janscó’s credit that the film
never lacks for energy, despite being wordless for more than half its runtime. Janscó
deftly cuts back and forth between two wildly different tones as the film
shifts seamlessly from neo-realist drama to surrealist fable without
sacrificing either its storytelling or its political ambitions.

‘It wants to be a parable’

The filmmakers’ facility for accomplishing both goals –
relating a touching story about a girl and her dog, while creating a compelling
metaphor for revolution – is finally what makes White God so impressive. Few filmmakers would have the audacity to
put something so strange on screen, something that is equal parts Au Hasard Balthasar and Jurassic Park, two movies Mundruczó said
he showed the crew while making the film.

The director and his collaborators never back away from the
challenge they have set for themselves, allowing the everyday drama of the film’s
first two acts to bleed into the fantastical final act without concern for
breaking the “reality” of the story. Too often, as audiences, we demand movies
be one or the other – hyper-real drama or far-fetched escapism. Mundruczó, Petrányi,
and Wéber let the real and the surreal co-exist in their screenplay, as it does
in so much of life, and the picture is more honest and gripping because of it.

“Sometimes, we say
it’s a tale, but it’s more of a parable, which is different, where you can use
more extreme characters because it’s a moral story,” said Wéber. “So, you can see it as a reality, but at
the same time, it’s more dark because it wants to be a parable, and it wants to
be more.”

Added Mundruczó:
“It’s not a realistic movie, so we use
more like a fairytale, like characters in a tale. But it’s like in our dreams.
So it’s reality on a special day.”